1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of network computing, and in particular to a method and system for managing context information in a web portal or enterprise portal comprising a hierarchical structure of portal pages and portlets for accessing web content or enterprise content accessible via the portal.
2. Related Art
FIG. 1 is a schematic system view of a portal server implementing a prior art web portal. The portal is implemented on a network server, for example, a web server 100. The web server 100 includes logic components for user authentication 105, state handling 110, and aggregation 170 of fragments. The web server 100 further includes a plurality of portlets 120, provided in respective pages 125, with a respective plurality of APIs 130 and respective portlet container software 135 for setting the pages 125 into a common Web page context, and some portal storage resources 140. The logic components are operatively connected such that data can be exchanged between single components as required.
A portal engine of the web server 100 in FIG. 1 implements an aggregation of portlets 120 based on an underlying portal model 150 and portal information such as security settings, user roles, customization settings, and device capabilities. Within a rendered page 125, the portal automatically generates the appropriate set of navigation elements based on the portal model 150. The portal engine invokes portlets 120 during the aggregation as required and when required and uses caching to reduce the number of requests made to the portlets 120.
A portlet container 135 is a single control component competent for all portlets 120, which may control the execution of code residing in each of these portlets 120. The portlet container 135 provides the runtime environment for the portlets 120 and facilities for event handling, inter-portlet messaging, and access to portlet instance and configuration data, among others. The portal resources 140 are in particular the portlets 120 themselves and the pages 125, on which they are aggregated in form of an aggregation of fragments. A portal database 128 stores the portlet description, which includes attributes such as the portlet name, portlet description, portlet title, portlet short title, and keywords. The portlet interaction interface description, which is often stored in form of WSDL (Web Services Description Language) documents, can also be stored in the portal database 128. The portal database 128 also stores the portal content structure, i.e. the hierarchical structure of portal pages, which may again contain nested pages, and portlets. This data is stored in the portal database 128 in an adequate representation based on prior art techniques such as relational tables.
The aggregation logic 170 includes all steps that are required to assemble a page 125. Typically, these steps include loading content structure from storage, traversing the content structure, and calling the instances referenced in the structure in order to obtain their output, which is assembled to a single page 125. The content structure may be defined through, e.g., portlet customization by an administrator or user and saved in the database, or by other ways, e.g., scripting, XML import, etc.
The handling of content information used by a user when navigating through a portal is not yet sufficient. When a user navigates through a typical user application, as for example a word processor or a desktop publishing program, the user may copy some context information, for example, a sentence or some graphical depiction into a clipboard-like memory, which is generally known as a “clipboard” in known operating systems. Such information can also be used by a further program application or at a different location in the same program application, which generated it. The handling of context information in the prior art allows a manual copy and a manually performed paste.
The handling of context information in web applications is of increased importance because the Internet provides a very broad variety of services from nearly all fields of interest. Also, due to the fact that time-dependant information such as news is provided via the Internet, the handling of context information should be improved in order to adapt to the basic user need to collect information associated with the user's own personal interests in a quick and easy way.
In the prior art, so-called “collaborative filtering techniques” are used for determination of context information. These techniques analyze the navigational behavior of a group of users by prior art data mining techniques. Context information is determined and created by analyzing the navigational behavior of a user group the members of which comply to a predetermined user profile.
A disadvantage is that prior art techniques are not yet user-specific enough in order to properly cover user-specific interests. In view of the tremendous importance of the Internet as a globally available data source the handling of such context information should be improved.
There is a need, therefore, for a method and system offering improved web portal navigation.